New Horizons Technology in conjunction with TeleToss has finally dropped the bomb and released the first 911 emergency disposable cellular phone. A quick check on their website indicates that two different phones are available from New Horizon Technologies. However, the more functional unit allowing for calls to other parties is not yet available as is the case with the Hop On Wireless disposable cellular phone. But there is something to be said about making progress and this is the first step. The 911 Plus T also allows for collect and credit card calls to be placed to other parties in the event of an emergency.
For the first time, retail and wholesale consumers alike were given the opportunity to place their online orders for 'disposable'
cell phones. Both, business and non-commercial customers have been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to purchase at least one of a small assortment of this new breed of telecommunications device. In the past three years, consumers have seen sporadic articles about the arrival of the 'disposable'
cell phone. Purchasing one of these phones, however, has proven difficult, if not impossible up to this time.
911 PLUS Emergency Cellphone First to Debut The first cellphone in the 'disposable' category to be released for retail sale online is the 911 PLUS Emergency CellphoneT from NEW HORIZONS TECHNOLOGIES; creators of the widely recognized, CYCLONEPHONET.
"Lightweight, efficient and attractive, the 911 PLUS T is already attracting Internet shoppers who simply want to make emergency, collect or calling
card calls here and there."
"TeleTOSS is thrilled to have been selected to debut the 911 PLUST cellphone," said Sabrina Scott-Pappas of TeleTOSS; "These phones are flying out of the door like birds!"
A review of the website showed the device listed at $38 per unit. A low cost and nifty little device that you can buy for your grandparents so they can toss it in the glove compartment until they really need it. These are coming out just in time for the Christmas shopping season. Maybe somebody will actually throw them on TV and see what happens. That would be very interesting to see the results of that campaign.
Now, Teletoss appears to be a startup that just began doing business in 2002 but they are from the Show Me state of Missouri. Not that being from Missouri accounts for much in the way of credibility but they are in Springfield which means that they understand Southern Hospitality at least. They don't list a toll free number on their site for capturing live orders but they do provide an email address in which to reach them with questions. Probably a smart move on their part or else they would probably be flooded with phone calls.
The Teletoss website is also worth a look around. The Teletoss fan club has an interesting approach and photos, they offer what they call wireless roadside assistance, and the disposable cell phone discussion has some good marketing points for the use of disposable cellular phones. We should also add that New Horizons has been fairly hard to reach and we actually thought a different company in Florida was going to pick up the product on an exclusive basis.
Seems that the folks at Teletoss were a bit more persistent and figured out how to get in the door on that one. More power to them and to New Horizons Technologies. In our case, we are rooting for New Horizons Technologies to establish a working model of their unit that can allow for other parties to be contacted. Only because it is obvious that they are working hard to launch the product. For now, we will just have to wait and see what next Christmas might have in store.
WHAT EXACTLY IS VERIZON WIRELESS DOING TO BEAT THE MARKET YOU ASK
Frankly, we haven't quite yet put our finger on that yet. We are constantly running to try and figure out how Verizon is leading the pack and throw down surprising stats as a challenge. Like the fact that Verizon Wireless pulled in 1.3 million new subscribers in the second quarter as of the end of June 2003. That number of new subscribers is almost double the
number of new subscribers that nearly every other major wireless carrier out there was able to accomplish. Here are the latest numbers from JD Powers.
For the purposes of dropped/disconnect calls, static/interference, voice distortion and no connection on the first try, Verizon Wireless came in first with Nextel and Cingular following. AT&T Wireless came in as average and Sprint PCS, Alltel, and T Mobile came in as performing under the industry average for this category. Their report showed that people in the North Central
region were the most satisfied with network quality. Then came those in the Southeast, Mid Atlantic, Southwest, West, and of course Northeast. New Yorkers are never satisfied.
Verizon Wireless indicated a churn rate of 1.7% and subtracting prepaid cellular subscriber churn brought that down to 1.4% in total. That is pretty impressive considering that Nextel used to be able to boast the lowest churn rate in the industry. However, the implementation of wireless number portability in November might skew those numbers pretty good for everybody when that comes about. It will be interesting to see who will be the winner of that race with subscriber switches.
The JD Powers report also indicated that those who experienced the most trouble with interference and static on calls were the most likely to switch carriers. A comment that is in line with other studies showing that network coverage quality would be the main reason for a subscriber to switch service providers. Verizon Wireless recent success may have something to do with all their testing and upgrading networks. They have issued a flood of press releases stating areas of the country they were going to be expanding or testing for network coverage quality.
Cingular appears to be more focused on publicity activities. Everything from sponsoring some event for the NAACP to concerts. I guess they were trying to show their diversity and generosity which isn't paying off from the looks of it. What I find even more interesting is the lack of targeting of the Hispanic population which is fast becoming the largest minority demographics in the US. However, both Verizon and Cingular are now working to close that gap with Cingular setting up what they called a Spanish internet portal and Verizon Wireless established a Spanish language website.
T Mobile press releases have been kind of light this year with focusing more on their activities in Austria. Based on the lack of information available in this article, you can see why it would be difficult to pinpoint a wireless carrier's success over others. There are far too many factors involved and events that we may not have been alerted too are probably taking place. Anything from multiple lawsuits brought on by retailers with the respective carrier to a misunderstanding of current market conditions.
Regardless of that fact, T Mobile, Cingular, and Verizon Wireless remain the top contenders of the wireless phone market for the US. Their rankings are in reverse order by the way. However, we do know one piece of the puzzle. Network coverage quality will be king of the day every time. Verizon Wireless has that factor well in their favor and could account for a large part of their success. The question remains on how they were able to pull off an outstanding second quarter. In that answer will be a heap of juicy competitive intelligence for the other wireless carriers.
What remains to be seen is if Verizon Wireless can do this a second and third time. If so, we will be digging like dogs looking for an old bone buried in the back yard.
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VISAGE MOBILE THE KINGMAKERS OF PRIVATE LABEL WIRELESS COMPANIES?
The real story behind Virgin Mobile and Boost Wireless and how you can do the very same thing to become a virtual wireless operator/service provider. Not only that, we found a company that can help smaller companies setup as a prepaid wireless service provider with a private label too. More industry secrets are about to be dropped in this article. Those of you who are true entrepreneurs and have the vision and contacts to make this work will become celebrities in their own right.
Just remember to give a plug to CPN as the one who helped to put you on the right path. Both Virgin Mobile and Boost Wireless are private label companies selling wireless services. Similar to what MCI
Worldcom had been doing when they were doing it. When these guys went into business, they needed about a million subscribers just to hope to break even due to the infrastructure investment. Visage Mobile is changing that with making entry only 3 to 5 million dollars. Sounds like a lot but it isn't for becoming a provider of wireless phone services.
May Disney become their first customer? They are looking at doing something like this with throwing up
Kiosks throughout the Disneyland attraction sites and stores. (See what happens when we get the smallest whiff of something potentially big?) Back to Visage. Neither of the founders have a background in wireless and in fact the CEO was the former CEO of a internet company that went bust during the dot com bubble burst after burning through $100 million before going bankrupt and neither have hit the grand ole age of 30. To get around this problem, they brought on industry veterans from MCI Worldcom, AT&T Rogers, Virgin Mobile, Sprint PCS, and other companies. With David Stevens, former Western Region President for Sprint PCS heading up operations of Visage Mobile as President.
It is believed that the business model will allow for as few as 50,000 subscribers to make it into a profitable operation. Turns out that the company via the young CEO has been able to pick up some heavy duty financial backing too. Four venture capital firms are behind the company. With seasoned veterans in charge of the various aspects of operations, it is expected that the burn rate of cash will be nowhere near what it used to be like for the dot coms that later went bust.
Next up is Qualcomm Communications Group. It has a subsidiary called Alliance Solutions Inc. A company that can help the smaller to mid-sized companies break into becoming a prepaid wireless service provider under their very own labels. That one is a bit cheaper with the initial startup investment being about $100,000 to get started as a full scale prepaid wireless service provider. Qualcomm is a bit different in industry experience because they go way way back. The founders go back to the days when cellular phones first started to become available to the public. They can set you up quickly too and have you in operation in about 30 days. That is fast!
From their website, we pulled this extract. Alliance Prepaid Wireless Solution offers the appearance of being a large prepaid wireless provider without the need to acquire and maintain costly infrastructure. Private label branding can occur on every aspect of the system, including the body of the handset and the prepaid airtime cards. With very little start-up investment, companies and organizations can create an exciting new opportunity for recurring revenue, with margins of 25%-80%.
Those of you who don't know who would want prepaid should look at the Hispanic demographics, College Students, Teens, etc. Basically, anyone who cannot get service with a credit check or cannot afford to have unlimited billing options. The key theme between the services provided by these two companies is that they allow for niche markets to be established and built. If you have a monopoly on every college store in the US, you have a seriously large customer base. If you cater to new arrivals to the US, you still have a seriously large customer base.
The nice part about the Alliance Prepaid Wireless Solution is that it allows for handset to activate airtime renewals over the air. In other words, the subscribers don't need a PC to activate online and you don't have to maintain a large call center service for activations. They will simply buy a prepaid wireless card, scratch off the pin, punch it into their handset, and the airtime is available to them. You can't beat a system like that because it helps to hold down costs tremendously.
If you want to make the wireless carriers nervous, just announce that you are opening your own virtual prepaid wireless service with Alliance Solutions. Smaller companies tend to be much faster at responding to market forces leaving their larger competitors running to catch up. Now if you are wondering how we know so much about so many things, the answer is simple. It is our job to know these things and we know
a lot more than we really let on. We can also tell you that Qualcomm Communications Group was the only company out of a dozen that we have seen in the years that has remained in competition for this type of offering.
We have spoken to them directly on more than one occasion and this is a company that we are fairly confident in saying they are solid. When it comes to Wireless, they know more about the technical stuff than we know about the industry. To say that is saying quite a bit. Our spies, I mean confidential informants, are everywhere. For the record, I have already established that I will rot in jail rather than give up a source. (Not even for cheesecake will I part my lips!)
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MORE COMPILATIONS - RUMOR HAS IT SPRINT PCS GETTING IN ON THE PTT GAME
Rumor has it that Push to Talk (PTT) is being developed by Sprint PCS by alleged employees of the company. One employee noted that gag orders and threats of being terminated from employment were being circulated to prevent leaks on the progress and development of PTT services for PCS subscribers. Turns out that Sprint PCS is also outsourcing customer service and activation calls to India and the Indian call center reps are told to use American sounding names too.
Add American Express, IBM, Nortel, JP Morgan (research), Candle Corp., and General Electric and many other large corporations to that roster of using Indian call centers. BellSouth is now outsourcing to India as well. BellSouth is claiming that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies utilize India for their application support! It might be time for a career change for IT professionals in the US or join a Union. Call Center professionals may not have it so bad. We have heard of two companies in the past week who left India with one coming back to the US and the other looking at South Africa, Ireland, Canada, and the US as an alternate location for their call center services as opposed to India.
Unless we are mistaken on our part, Nortel appears to be outsourcing application projects related to their wireless interests to India as well. Nortel employees affected will be from France, Brazil, and Canada. Surprisingly, the relocation of call center functions back to the US was cited as being due to cultural differences in India. It turns out that we as Americans are hard to figure out in what we are thinking and why. Allowing for plenty of miscommunication. But that can happen in the US too. We have heard on many occasions that call center agents for
Tracfone are often inconsistent in their resolution to problems and are sometimes downright rude and obnoxious.
Enough call center and IT jobs have been outsourced overseas to effectively eliminate the unemployment in the US and boost the economy's recovery if they remained in the states. The response from these companies is that they must meet the demands of a global marketplace. Of which the US is 85% of their customer base. Verizon Wireless doesn't outsource to India. Not because they are being generous and conscientious of the economy dilemma but because they have a union that won't let them. Then again, it could be said that I am the chicken screaming the sky is falling. There are tons of call center jobs out there that people in the US aren't taking for some reason. The IT jobs, well that is a whole different story.
On to my favorite disposable cellular phone company. The CEO was routed at Hop On Wireless due to some less than savory practices in the past that ended up with an FBI investigation. They are working the publicity card with stating agreements with various manufacturers to license technology for disposable phones. Motorola, Lucent Technologies, Ericsson, etc. It has been quite a while since they said that disposable phones would be the wave of the future. That was about four years ago I think. Therefore, this activity only warrants a blurb rather than a full article.
The GSM Association is supporting action by the European Commission to combat the rising nuisance of SMS mobile phone spam for EU subscribers. The association is actually being quite fair about it with stating that the regulations should be applied fairly, allow companies to market and announce their services to their own subscribers (as is done here in the US), and pointed out that SMS mobile phone spam has taken a toll on European carriers with discontented subscribers and that SMS spam must be stopped.
Keep your eyes feasted on Fastmobile! The company launched as PTT fast chat service to appeal to the younger demographics in the age groups of 18 to 25 years old. Our understanding is that it will be something of a virtual PTT service which will allow carriers to throw down the handsets, establish the billing platform, and off they go without altering their network configurations. That should keep things interesting!
An invitation to visit www.cell-phones-info.com
website. A South African website seeking to become an industry information source on cellular phones including highlights of
manufacturers' performances and background history. They are just getting launched so how about giving them a hand with providing them with feedback on your mobile phones and related information. They even provided us with some interesting statistics on the RSA. About 25% of the population has cellular phones with those over 16 at a 50% penetration rate in a country where PC ownership is only 10%.
Cellular Phone No-No Zone Signs. Cellular phones just joined the ranks of the 'No Smoking' and 'No Loitering' signage. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has licensed a new logo designed to denote areas where cellular phones can not be used. The logo is available for use on signs and stickers and can be purchased at
www.nocellphonezone.com. According to Susan Middleton Marshall, designer of the logo, hospitals, conference centers, libraries, theaters and funeral homes have already contacted the Web site and expressed interest in purchasing the logo. 'Displaying the logo helps businesses and institutions gently remind patrons to use their cellular phones in designated areas,' Marshall says.
Teen foils bad man with a camera phone. A criminal and sick-minded fool attempted to abduct a male teenager. The teenager fought back and broke free. No sooner had he broken away and he actually took out his camera phone, snapped pictures of the potential kidnapper, his car, and his license plate. The teenager turned over the evidence to the police and the nutcase moron was captured the next day and is now looking at five years in prison with a $25,000 fine. Yeah, I am kind of liking these camera phones after all.
Taking pictures of criminals in the act is really cool.
18 - 24-Year-Olds Replacing Landline with Wireless. Most people completely replacing their landline phones with wireless phones are between 18 and 24 years old, according to The Yankee Group's 2003 Mobile User Young Adult Survey. While 12 percent of respondents who said they had replaced their landline phones were in the
18 to 24-year-old age group, just 4 percent were older than 24. Further, among the
18 to 24-year-old group, another 28 percent said they plan to replace their landlines within the next five years.
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COMMENTS, OPINIONS, AND THE HEROES OF AMERICA
I just don't get it. Here I am cramping my fingers, racking my brain, and conducting dry eye
Visine flooding research and we actually have five people unsubscribe from our publication! I was the first to stick my tongue out at them too. Not once but twice just for good measure. I can't imagine how I may have offended anyone either. It couldn't have been my comments on New Yorkers, or spilling industry secrets, or picking on Democrats, or the thousand other topics I wrote about could it?
Well, I can't pick on Californians because they are so strange they define the word and it wouldn't do no good to say they are rude because they drive too fast to figure out if they are being rude or just driving normally by California standards. I can't help but spill my guts when I learn about something because I couldn't possibly keep a secret without a few greenbacks to seal my lips for a day or two, and all politicians are fair game in my book regardless of party affiliations. Then again, some retailers may have taken our comments personally and decided to unsubscribe. Guilty conscience maybe? Their loss and other
retailers' gain.
Allow me to apologize to anyone who feels that they have been slighted, real or imagined. However, I do not apologize for keeping the articles lively and in line with reality. The truth cannot be withheld and we cannot always ensure that everyone is in agreement with what they are reading. We will not hold back punches and we do not endorse Verizon Wireless although we don't pick on them as much as others. They just seem to be better prepared in keeping their laundry out of public view.
With that said, we are always soliciting feedback from our readers. If you would like for us to cover more on other topics, stop bashing politicians, or whatever, we want to hear from you. As the saying goes, if you don't vote, don't complain about public policy. The same goes here. If you don't tell us the what, why, when, where, or how then you can stop reading in protest but it won't have the monumental impact that you might have hoped. Simply because we are not blessed with ESP and therefore will have no clue what it is that you are protesting. So we will do what most people would do and shrug our shoulders and move on.
Those of you who sent in the Kudos and compliments on our latest issue. A big hearty thanks back at ya! One reader said, "Love the articles--Tell it like it is- and keep it coming." To you we say, 'your wish is our command!' I mean with so many of our readers turning into such loyal fans, how can we say no to any of you. We often call our
articles "wireless poetry". Whether they are poetry or not can be debated but we aren't thinking we will win any contests anytime soon.
Last but not least, we need to comment on one other issue that is dear to our hearts. Our heroes of America. From the soldiers in Iraq to those who push for educating the public about special interest groups trying to infringe on our rights as American citizens. To those people, we salute you and thank you for your service to America. Allow me to point out one more item for the idiotic terrorists who align themselves with Al Quaeda. For some reason, they think that their determination is stronger than that of the sum whole of America.
These boneheads have failed to review the history of the American people. We as a people have fought and died for many causes in numerous conflicts since our country began. Why these terrorists think that our determination and resolve should be weakened because they have nothing better to do with their pathetic lives than die because of their jealousy of America is beyond me. Every American soldier that dies in Iraq or some other country only makes that resolve that much stronger. Their error in thinking that the more liberal media types are actually the feelings of America in general.
Well, I have news for you. As Americans, we have the right to independent thought and we exercise that right as we wish. The media is not the pulse of America and neither the media nor celebrities have the power of influencing our opinions as they like to think they have. So here is what I have to say to those misguided terrorists. I think you are a bunch of yellow bellied cowards with no more sense than god gave a
sheep. I am sure many others probably feel that way too. In my case, I laugh at your cowardice.
If you need a few additional examples of bravery and heroism, try looking to the British, Irish, Australian, and Polish people and you might actually learn something about that. I should add that people from all over the world from just about every country read this publication so they too will now know what you are. The laughing stock of the world because nobody but you and your friends are impressed with what you do.
Take the conviction for the Bali terrorist attack for example. That moron terrorist grinned and gave a thumbs up when the death sentence was handed down and the crowd began cheering. They weren't cheering for him, they were cheering because he was sentenced to death. I guess nature has
its own way of getting rid of stupid people and ensuring the survival of the fittest, doesn't it. In the meantime, take some Prozac for your bipolar mental disorder and get a life.
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